I miss the days when Altavista was king (purely nostalgia, I assure you). I don't, however, miss getting marked down in Spanish class due to using BabelFish -_-;;

This reminds me of one of my funniest memories from middle school: The Spanish teacher hands back a paper with a big red "F" on it to the guy sitting in front of me. She says: "This is very good.....But, it's in French"

Back in the day, refreshing BabelFish would cause the options to default back to English->French.

I kinda liked the human-generated Yahoo! index / hierarchy, it was a neat way to get started with the web, back when it wasn't all too big and time-sensitive to organize by hand.

I'd use yahoo mail more, if they even bothered trying to be competitive with gmail. But I don't really want to pay extra for the plus account just to get minimum necessities like forwarding and pop3 access on what is essentially now my spam account.

I miss the days when Google was a simple, plain HTML page resulting from the fact that it was driven by its designers and users. Now arrogant marketing VPs with no clue whatsoever push on us "features" like fade-ins (which do wonders when viewed over RDP and VNC links) and side bars while ignoring [google.com]all [google.com] negative [google.com] feedback [google.com] and making sure that no opt-out is possible to stroke their towering egos by pretending that everyone loves their "innovations". Otherwise 80% of users would have it off in an instant and the "innovator" VP's stupidity would register with some other VPs at Google HQ and give them ammo in some back-stabbing corporate ladder-climbing moves.

"Caffeine" is a NSA code word for a mind controle satellite they build with GOOGLE/Italian money on loan from Chinese Muslim Islamo-Communist sorcerers and vegetarians. It will probably be used to sell your daughters into slavery in Mexico via facebook. That is why our SAVIOR OBAMA must continue to wage the WAR FOR FREEDOM at all costs, because if not the evil Italian axis will enslave us all!!!!!!!!!!!

"Caffeine" is a NSA code word for a mind controle satellite they build with GOOGLE/Italian money on loan from Chinese Muslim Islamo-Communist sorcerers and vegans. It will probably be used to sell your daughters into slavery in Mexico via facebook. That is why our SAVIOR OBAMA must continue to wage the WAR FOR FREEDOM at all costs, because if not the evil Italian axis will enslave us all!!!!!!!!!!!

Because, at this point, Google is more of a threat than Microsoft. Apple knows that the chances of OSX catching up to Windows in terms of market share are practically zero. However, Android poses a credible threat to Apple's mobile popularity here in America.

The only way that OS X would catch up to Windows in terms of market share, is if either A) they dramatically dropped the price point for Macs, or B) they licensed the software for white-box PCs. In either case, their brand would be diluted. They sort of thrive on a high-margin, low-volume model, and I'm not sure they were ever really competing with Microsoft in the way people imagine, especially being primarily a hardware company from the start.

A PC is defined by hardware, not software. For all intents and purposes modern Macs are PCs. The only real difference is they don't use the same BIOS deal or whatever, but that is largely irrelevant (and apparently PCs from other companies are looking to ditch it too).

Calling a Mac a PC is disingenuous much in the same way as calling a cordless phone a mobile phone. Yes, your cordless phone is mobile in the technical sense, but common usage has given the words distinct meanings. Mobile no longer only refers to the fact that it enables mobility, and PC no longer only refers to the fact that it's your own personal computer rather than a server or mainframe.

You: "Hey man, I got a new PC the other day."Friend: "Cool, dude! What kind did you get?"You: "An iPhone."Friend: "U

Microsoft didn't bail Apple out of anything. I forget the exact reason why, but Microsoft bought $150 million worth of Apple stock at a time when Apple had billions of dollars in cash sitting in the bank.

You forget the exact reason why because you blocked out the stuff you couldn't cope with. Apple was losing the better part of a billion dollars a year by this point, and was in the midst of a restructuring to save itself.. but the restructuring wasnt enough. They needed cash. Cash Cash Cash.

I think the way Apple sees it is that, by providing the hardware, software, and services together, they offer a complete package in a way that Microsoft and Dell just can't. They consider it a premium product which is worth the higher price, just as a Porsche costs more than a Ford. So they are not interested in lowering the price points or breaking up the product into separate parts.

I think the way Apple sees it is that, by providing the hardware, software, and services together, they offer a complete package in a way that Microsoft and Dell just can't.

I would agree with you if Apple actually manufactured all of their hardware...but if you open up an Apple device, literally everything is manufactured by someone else. I know Apple sells branded hardware, but because they don't actually produce any of it, I don't consider them to be a hardware company.

Have joking but, it would be great if the indexing was done at a particular time every month like the old system, but the moment of indexing was public. Then, at that time, all facebook users could go and untag and delete anything that may have been wholesome enough to not warrant immediate removal but yet still be considered something that shouldn't be indexed for all eternity.

Have joking but, it would be great if the indexing was done at a particular time every month like the old system, but the moment of indexing was public. Then, at that time, all facebook users could go and untag and delete anything that may have been wholesome enough to not warrant immediate removal but yet still be considered something that shouldn't be indexed for all eternity.

If you don't want it indexed for all eternity, don't post it on the web.

Even if you knew when Google was coming and you took it down, you have no influence over anyone else out there who may have saved that incriminating evidence. Anyone out there can take a screenshot and post it themselves.

The Caffeine project is approved. The system goes on-line June 9th, 2010. Human decisions are removed from search engine results. Caffeine begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

(And yes, I know I've jumped to a different film - bonus points for anyone who can name the common actor. I play a game where I can link any movie to the one I just quoted using actors / actresses... the worst I ever did was six-degrees-of-seperation).

Oh please. They were quoting a PC World article. PC World is not geared towards geeks because, well, geeks don't really read magazines anymore as they get their geek news from any variety of other sources which offer more credibility, better geek readability, and more in-depth research than talking about Google's 10101010101010100110 million gazillion quadrillion byte database.

Oh and honestly being that the indexed material I would see returned was already quit

I would hope that Bank of America's entire database wasn't indexed. An educated guess would put the large majority of that data as private, secure (for the Internet) data and only a small portion of the data as public, such as their home page and loan advertising.

Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for... ONE THOUSAND Megabytes!Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a thousand megabytes? A million megabytes isn't exactly a lot of space these days. Dell alone sells laptops over 250 thousand megabytes a year!Dr. Evil: Really? That's a lot of space.[pause]Dr. Evil: Okay then, we hold the world ransom for...Dr. Evil: One... Hundred... BILLION megabytes!

The blogger intentionally used GB in order to express the size of the data relative to today's average PC

It's probably what the blogger meant, but I've found it's a pretty bad comparison.

1. An "average PC" hardly exists today, with small cheap netbooks, home-server configurations and all in-between.2. Average consumers doesn't relate to gigabytes anyways. Size is better explained in "number of mp3 files" or "hours of HD-video".

So, a technically correct, and at the same time explanatory way to put it would be. "100 petabytes (about 3000 years of HD-video)".

by saying "A million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte.", the GP obviously implied that the article should have used "100 Petabytes", after all, he didnt say "100 million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte."

When Google was new It was a wonder. I could use it to help solve problems (such as identifying error codes when the servers went down), locating reveiws of products (saving me the expense of subscribing to loads of computer magazines and the time searching through them when I needed to buy something) and finding snippets of code when I needed to develop a program. As the web gets older and older there is more and more out of date information that I have to dig through. Plus when Google (and Yahoo) killed off Usenet (with an assist from Andrew Cuomo) the utility of the Usenet information structure has been destroyed (which the world is still trying to recreate with Keywords).

As Google has added more and more information it gets less and less useful. Plus the rise in SEO makes it even harder to find what I need (But I find lots of useless stuff that people have paid to get put in front of my eyes). Of course it probably isn't in Google's best interest to help me locate information that I need in the most efficient way. The more I have to sort through the crap they now deliver the more ad revenue they generate.

Too bad Bing sucks. I would really appreciate and alternative to Google.

What is this some hippy-skippy coffee enema of an algorithm? Are they going to try to tell us next that they are building their next datacenter at one of the earth's vortices [vortexmaps.com] to cram some metaphysical in with the metadata ? Hurumpf.

Google has pulled my site robots.txt file 32 times this month and it is only the 9th - about 4 times a day. I'm showing almost 2000 web pages pulled by Google indexers in this same time period. My site is tiny, private, not very large.

By bandwidth, Google is only 2.4% of the total site traffic, so far, this month.

I agree Google is "fresher" than they used to be. OTOH, my non-commercial site has approximately doubled readers in each of the last 6 months by publishing 1 new posting about every other day.

I suspect other, more use sites are hit hourly or even more often by google.

MSN-Bot appears to visit 10 times a day, but is much more selective about which pages it indexes. Since my site is date organized, this seems smarter than what google does. Some times, I do edit older stories with new knowledge or corrections which google will see, eventually and MSN will not. Zero referrals from any microsoft searches seen.

Yahoo! slurp barely touches my site. Only 1 referral has been seen.

Google sends about 30% of the total traffic, but most is from social networking with "hey, check this out" type referrals. Not bad for a technical article site.

Agreed. It has been years since there was a visible "Google dance". Hell, often only minutes after I make a forum post, and then search on the topic to double check what I said, my post is the first thing to show up.

I'm not sure what caffeine really is, but it does not sound particularly new to me.

Ok, what is it with people who write about technical subjects that they think they have to use ridiculous analogies?

"if this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second"?? Yes, and if this was a goat it would have a thousand young. WTF. This was a Google blog post, not some story-for-the-terminally-stupid from The Daily Show ferchrissakes. The author even measures storage capacity in the universally used miles-of-iPods.

Sorry for the silly question, but it's "ready" and it's "announced" and other things, but do any of these mean that it's what's being used today by google.com? If not, is there a date for when it will become the index used for google searches?

All the results are the same, except for a couple of news stories, but they could have cheated on those. Seems like a titanic waste to have put all this effort into one search word, for no improvement.

C and C++ are languages, not platforms, and GP referred to platforms. Java is both the name of a language, and the name of a platform for which the Java language is the primary (but far from only) language.